Career Advice from Conversations With Experts
Short of time? Read the key takeaways.
🤝 Networking matters and can be authentic. A recent survey of over 10,000 people in the US found that roughly 32% of new hires appear to come from employee referrals. Try reaching out to people in jobs you find interesting just to learn about them, then ask who else to talk to.
🎯 Cold applying can be done well (or done poorly). Simply emailing an organization and saying "I'd love to help" is hard to act on. But if you're able to show them you understand a real challenge they face and can provide evidence that you can help, then sometimes you'll get hired even without an open role.
😰 If networking sounds like a nightmare, gradual exposure could help. Spencer Greenberg (founder of Clearer Thinking) used to dread talking to strangers, but through exposure therapy he gradually built up from asking strangers the time to asking for hugs. The people he approached were friendly (not hostile as his brain predicted) and now he genuinely enjoys networking.
🌍 There are roughly 80,000 working hours in an average US lifetime, which means that your work time is a large resource for doing good (or bad). When trying to evaluate the impact of your career, it's helpful to focus on four factors:
How pressing the are the problems you're solving with your work?
How effective are the solutions you're working on?
How much leverage do you have in that career path?
What is your personal fit to that career path?
🚀 Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. For the median person, employment might be the better path, and about 90% of startups fail. But for people with certain traits, entrepreneurship may be a good bet in expectation.
Do you want help thinking about your next career move? Maybe it’s a transition, a promotion, a career change, or simply figuring out what you want to do next. Well, over the years, Spencer Greenberg has talked to a variety of experts on the Clearer Thinking podcast, and they have given some career advice that might be valuable to you. We've compiled some of the best of it in this article, covering:
Networking
Cold applying to jobs
A career tip for the socially anxious
Having an impact
Should you be an entrepreneur?
By the way, we’re running a free online workshop you might also enjoy: “Thinking Clearly About Career Change: What the Evidence Says, and What it Can't Tell You”. It will happen Wednesday, September 30, 12pm Eastern (9am Pacific, 5pm UK). Click here to learn more and save your spot. |
1. Networking
Recent research findings suggest that the largest portion of job hirings in the US comes from the method of simply finding a job posting and applying for it. But the second largest (at 32%) appears to come from being referred by an existing employee. In other words, from people’s “networks”.
While it's nice to imagine that the most qualified and skilled candidates always get picked, the reality is that you sometimes have to know someone involved in order to even be in the running. On the other hand, “networking” has an ick factor for many people because of its transactional nature. So, how do you network in a manner that's both effective and authentic?
In the podcast episode with Raffi Grinberg (author of How to Be a Grown Up), Grinberg offers the following tip:
“Go on LinkedIn, find some people who have [jobs you’re interested in], reach out to them, and try to have a conversation. The point of the conversation doesn't need to be extremely pointed [or] have a specific goal that you're trying to get something out of them. It's more about just learning about them and asking them questions. Those people are happy to talk about themselves and tell you about their work and their lives. At the end of the conversation, say, if it's true, ‘This was great. Are there two other people I should talk to who'd be interesting to me?’ Then your network starts growing exponentially.”
When it comes to authentic networking at events, here's the advice of Clearer Thinking founder, Spencer Greenberg:
Pick events to go to where the sort of people you want to meet more of are likely to be. These aren't necessarily the sort of events you'd naturally be drawn to, and that's okay. Once you're at such an event, set the goal of introducing yourself to many different people, even if you find it nerve-racking to do so - it's a great way to challenge yourself. Do your best to approach those you meet with genuine, interested attention. But once you've talked to someone for a little while, if you don't gel with them, don't force it just because you think they'd be a good connection. Try to find people there you naturally like and get along with, and get to know them. When you approach it that way, there's little tension between networking and authenticity.
2. Cold applying to jobs
Sometimes, when pursuing career opportunities, you may want to reach out to an organization to enquire about opportunities. In the episode featuring Devon Fritz (co-founder of High Impact Professionals), listeners are encouraged to try:
“Finding organizations you care about that you think are doing good, impactful work, and reaching out to them proactively and saying, ‘I’m interested in helping people at your organization, here's my skill set.’”
Spencer adds some useful extra detail:
“At our organization, Clearer Thinking, I found that sometimes people reach out and say, ‘I’d love to help.’ It’s way more likely to be a fit if they can propose something specific that they're good at that could be useful to us. If it's just, ‘Hey, I’d like to help,’ that's very difficult to work with. But if they say, ‘Hey, I'm an expert in this aspect of website development; I noticed that your website could be improved in this way. I could walk your team through how to do this.’ Boom. That's helpful. It's a clear way to slot the person in for a particular task. As you point out, the younger and smaller the organization, the more of these gaps there tend to be."
A more general version of this advice is: if you can reach a person at an organization, show them that you understand a significant challenge their organization has that is relevant to their role, and can make a credible case that you can help with it, you may be able to catch their interest and perhaps get hired. This even works sometimes when an organization has no official role that's open, so long as they have the budget to hire and are persuaded you could help with something that's important to them.
3. A career tip for the socially anxious
Some people (particularly those who are introverted or socially anxious) find the prospect of networking or cold applying nightmarish. Fortunately, exposure therapy can help to reduce the negative impact of those fears. On the podcast, Clearer Thinking’s founder Spencer Greenberg has shared details of his own journey with exposure therapy to treat social anxiety, which has made networking much more enjoyable for him:
“When I was maybe in my early 20s, I thought, ‘Okay, I should really do something about this,’ and I went to a therapist. Much to my great surprise, he said, ‘Okay, well, I can help you. Here's what you're going to do: every weekend, you're going to pick a bar, and you're going to go there alone, and you're going to start talking to strangers. You just strike up conversations.’ I found this to be one of the most terrifying things I could imagine. Obviously, there's nothing objectively frightening about it, but to my social anxiety brain, it felt like my heart was going to explode at the idea of doing this because it tapped into the kind of interactions with strangers that made me afraid. He had me build up to it somewhat. I would start with really simple things, like I would literally just go up to people and say, ‘Oh, do you know what time it is?’ It was hard at first, but it got easier. [Then] he had me do things that were a little bit harder, like, ‘Oh, hey, what's that drink you're drinking? It looks good. Tell me what it's called,’ or whatever. Then I built up to just saying, ‘Hi, I'm Spencer.’ Eventually, I started taking matters into my own hands and giving myself even harder challenges, culminating with one of the hardest challenges, which was to go up to men at bars and say, ‘Hey, would you mind giving me a hug?’ My brain predicted that they were going to punch me in the face or something, but the reality was that I think every single time I did this, they were just friendly about it and perfectly nice. They thought it was funny or whatever.”
If there is someone in your local area specializing in Exposure Therapy (or CBT more broadly), and you can afford to work with them, we recommend that as your first port of call. Having an expert walk you through the process and support you is really useful.
But if you have sufficient motivation to improve, you can also apply Exposure Therapy yourself (however, if you have severe trauma, PTSD, or debilitating phobias, we highly recommend working with a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist rather than attempting this).
4. Having an Impact
Why do career choices matter? One reason that’s rarely discussed (outside of a few niche circles) is that the time you spend working is a resource that you can use to do good (or bad). The average person in the US works for roughly 80,000 hours in their lifetime, so the choices you make about how to spend those hours can dramatically alter the impact you have on the world.
Of course, some people have little control of the work they do – they need to take whatever work they can get to support themselves or their families. But if you're in the position to be able to plan a longer career trajectory and take into account other factors, you can consider what kind of impact your career has.
In the episode “How to Use Your Career to Have a Large Impact”, Spencer talks with Ben Todd, the co-founder of 80,000 Hours (a career advice platform for people who want to have an impact). Todd argues:
“When people think about doing good or having an ethical life, we often think about things like recycling, or fair trade, or maybe [we] think about being really honest, and being a virtuous person. But I actually think the most important decision that should be on our minds is: “What are you actually going to do with your career?” because that's the thing that will determine your social and ethical impact on the world to the biggest extent possible.”
They discuss a four-factor framework for maximizing the impact you have with your career:
A Four-Factor Career Impact Framework:
How pressing is the problem you’re focusing on?
How effective is the solution you’re working on?
How much leverage do you have in that career path?
What is your personal fit to that career path?
There’s a lot of variation in each of those four factors, so improving any one of them can end up increasing your impact by a lot.
The typical advice you’ll hear is to find something you’re passionate about, or that’s personally meaningful to you, and pour yourself into that. Ben says there’s a pretty good idea behind that advice: you’re more likely to be good at something you care about, and you’re more likely to stick with it for a long time. That will increase your impact, if you get the other factors right too. However, those other factors are critical: if you’re focussing on an entirely irrelevant problem, or a “solution” that actually makes things worse, no amount of passion is going to make your impact positive.
5. Should you be an entrepreneur?
Matt Clifford is the cofounder of Entrepreneur First and chair of the UK government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. In his discussion with Spencer, he argues that entrepreneurship is not the best path for everyone, but that it has high expected value for some people:
“I think all the evidence in the academic literature, but also in my experience, is that for the median person, employment is a much better path than entrepreneurship. That's true, whatever you measure — whether you measure economic outcomes, whether you measure reports of life satisfaction — it is clear that for the median person, employment is better. But what I'm interested in is the idea that for people with quite exceptional talents, people who might be in the top few percent by some measure of ability, actually, for them, the evidence is much less clear. In fact, for them the evidence suggests the opposite, that in expectation, entrepreneurship may be a much better path than employment for them.”
The best estimates suggest that about 90% of startup organizations fail. That's sobering, and suggests that it may only be rational for those who are least risk-averse, and who have attributes that make them especially well suited to it. And yet, for the right people with the right ideas, entrepreneurship can be tremendously impactful and rewarding.
Clifford identifies the following as important traits for entrepreneurs:
General intelligence, especially applied problem-solving
Resilience and extreme determination
An “edge” (i.e., “some functional skill at which they are exceptional”)
Comfort challenging the status quo and operating outside structured environments
Self-direction and initiative
Comfort with ambiguity
Being “really, really good at telling the signal from the noise” (i.e., discerning what their experiences actually provide evidence of)
“Followership” (i.e., the ability to attract people around you to participate in what you’re doing, which may include investors, team members, and/or customers)
Ambition
This aligns somewhat with our own large study into entrepreneurship and startups, which found that (from among the traits we looked at) the strongest positive personality predictors of startup success are things like: risk tolerance, taking initiative, seeking critical feedback, extraversion, enthusiasm, honesty.
As a result of our research into entrepreneurship, we developed a free interactive tool that gives you feedback on your strengths and weaknesses as a potential startup founder. You can try it here:
But for-profit entrepreneurship is not the only way to be entrepreneurial.
If you’re someone drawn to entrepreneurship and you want to have an impact, you might find value in Spencer’s conversation with Joey Savoie (co-founder of Ambitious Impact and Charity Science). Joey argues that starting a charity is:
“one of the most exciting career paths that very few people consider. There's a huge social enterprise movement, large-for-profit entrepreneurship movement, but charities don't just pop out of the ground; they need to come from some sort of place. And I don't think most people have that on their radar as a thing to do or a career path to pursue. [...] [A]s a charity, you can focus exclusively on having [an] impact. So, with social enterprise, you get the benefits of maybe getting to a larger scale, if you can find a for-profit mechanism that ramps up. But you're constantly pulled in two directions between that for-profit motive and actually doing good. Charities, on the other hand: generally, it’s a much less competitive market (not everyone is striving to make the most impact or the most difference). Probably less talent on average is drawn to it, partly because it's a neglected field. So I think if your sole goal (or at least your primary goal) is having an impact, charity entrepreneurship offers a really large advantage.”
What you can do next
If you found these tips useful, or you’re interested in discovering more career advice, you might want to sign up for our free online careers workshop, happening next week:
Free online workshop “Thinking Clearly About Career Change: What the Evidence Says, and What it Can't Tell You” Wednesday, September 30, 12pm Eastern (9am Pacific, 5pm UK) |
